Where we were

It was 1956. I turned nine years old in October. My little brother, Joe B., had just turned five in August.

We lived in a house on one steep side of Spring Valley. We moved there the year I turned six (and Joe B. was two), so by the time I was nine we had lived there for about three years.

This house had once been a barn. It still looked barnlike. It was halfway up - or halfway down - a hillside. It was not an easy house to get to.

No one ever came up the front steps to the front door of that house. One reason was that the front walk started at the steepest part of the road below the house, where was no place for a car to stop or even for you to stand on the side of the road. Another was that from the road below the front door was almost invisible behind a curtain of pine trees planted across the front of the house.

If you had climbed up the front steps to the little iron gate, covered with honeysuckle vines, and had gotten it open and climbed up the hill to the front of the house, you would have found concrete steps up to a concrete stoop that had pulled out away from the house and you would have had to step across that gap to get in the door. I think there might have been a snake that lived in that dark space. Or maybe I made that up because it sounded exciting. Still it's no wonder no one ever came in that way.

Everyone came in the side door.

Of course you couldn’t drive up to that side door. To get to the house by car, you would have driven past the front gate and front path, around a curve in the valley until you could turn uphill on Spring Valley Circle. Then you would follow the road curving back along the hill until you were higher than the house. You would have turned off on a narrow gravel lane that ran towards the house. It didn't go all the way to the house.

At its end this gravel lane widened into a turnaround. There was a small cinderblock house there where Cecil and Thelma Hite lived. (They also owned the barn-house where we lived. I'll tell you more about them later. ) You would park your car there where the lane ended. You would get out and not even see our house yet. Here's how you would actually get to the house: you would climb down the hill.

You had to go down a narrow path, first stepping down to a small terrace (that was where Thelma built her fire and cooked her apple butter in a big iron cauldron in the fall). The hillside was so steep that if you looked straight down from that terrace, you would see the top of the roof of our house below. It was so steep that the path didn’t go straight down. First it turned left and went fairly gently down along one side of the hill. Then there was a sharp turn where you could look out and see over to the golf course on the other side of the valley, and then the path came back along the hill to the right. Now it went sharply down on bumpy stone steps and beside it a tall old pine tree completely hid the view. It turned again straight downhill where a small path went off to the “tool shed” where our Dad had his workshop. You stayed on the steps that went down by a low stone wall to the stone patio outside the side door of the house.

So there you would be, at the door of the house where we lived when I was nine.